“Do you mean to tell me you saw something, actually?”
“Of course. You ought to know me better than to think I was fooling.”
“What were they then—mud hens?”
“Say, you’re a mud rooster. No, what I saw looked to me uncommonly like our missing canoes.”
“You don’t say so,” half mockingly.
“But I do say so,—and most emphatically, too, as Professor Jorum says,” rejoined the stout youth, “there they’ve gone now. That morning mist’s swallowed ’em up just like I mean to swallow breakfast directly.”
“But what would the canoes be doing drifting about?” objected Merritt. “From Rob’s story yesterday, Hunt and his gang had them in that cove. Do you suppose they’d have let them get away?”
“Maybe not, willingly,” rejoined Tubby sagely, who, as our readers may have observed, was a shrewd thinker, “but it blew pretty hard last night. The canoes may have broken loose from their moorings.”
“Jimminy! That’s so,” exclaimed Merritt, “I’ll go and tell——”
“No, you won’t do anything of the kind,” said Tubby, half in and half out of his Boy Scout shirt.